


think naught but this and all is mended

by syllic



Category: Alex Stern - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:00:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21844828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syllic/pseuds/syllic
Comments: 6
Kudos: 70
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	think naught but this and all is mended

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Greens](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Greens/gifts).



It was possible to learn to love a new neighborhood.

New Haven was Darlington’s city: always had been, always would be, but his roots were at Black Elm, in Westville, and Darlington had always thought there was something strangely blank about East Rock. Rows of Victorian houses, each packed with a strangely uniform assortment of graduate students that moved from house to house, exchanging roommates and spaces in a continually moving stream: a neighborhood playing a perpetual game of musical chairs.

He’d never felt any desire to wander up here—not before. But on one of the many days that the darkness had built up inside him since his return, turning his tongue acid and making his head pound, Pammie had stepped between him and Alex before the argument they’d been building toward could truly break out, hustling them out the door of Il Bastone, pointing north, and saying, “Walk.”

Darlington had been striding as fast as he could, not quite willing to leave Alex behind but not ready to walk beside her, before he realized that what had felt like a stifling consistency before now felt like a pleasant, reassuring familiarity: East Rock had a stolidly non-threatening air about it, and Darlington had never appreciated what a gift that was.

They’d walked all the way up Orange, but when they’d run into a large crowd of joggers almost at the edge of East Rock Park, Alex had taken his elbow in a firm grip, turned him left, and said, “This way. I think.”

They’d ended up at Edgerton Park. Darlington had known it was there—he knew every corner of the city—and he might have even gone there as a child, but he’d had no clear memory of it before that re-encounter, before Alex guided him there. As she led him through the gates and past the greenhouses, her small hand still vice-tight around Darlington’s arm, he wondered that he’d never thought to look for refuge there before.

“It’s peaceful here,” he’d said. “Though I’m surprised you know about it, Stern—when I saw you last you were still getting turned around in a three-block radius downtown.”

“I still get lost,” she’d answered, still sullen from their bickering. “I was lost when I first found this place. And it’s not peaceful on a Saturday morning when half the kids in the city seem to be here, having screaming competitions. But after everything last winter, and before… before we knew that we could get you back, sometimes I just felt like walking. And at the right time, it’s the perfect place.”

They’d turned a corner, past a small stand of trees, and Darlington had taken a happy, surprised breath when he’d seen the narrow stone path leading down to a meadow, irises and crocuses poking through the pale spring grass. The sun had been close to setting, and the dusk had given the field a hazy, ethereal quality.

“Yeah,” he’d said, shifting his arm so that Alex’s arm could slip through the crook of his elbow, turning her grip into a companionable grasp. “I know what you mean.”

&&&

“I told you I don’t like it when half the kids in the city are here,” Alex grumbled, pulling her sleeves down over her wrists in the evening air and looking around suspiciously.

“You’ll like this,” said Darlington. I hope.

“You’re expecting her to sit still for two hours?” said Pammie, raising an eyebrow. She’d gotten much sassier since Darlington had been away: too much Stern, he figured.

“Two hours?” Alex repeated, “This better be good.”

Darlington didn’t answer—he spread out the huge blanket they’d brought, finding a space for them between two families, and started helping Pammie with the food.

“It’s Shakespeare in the Park,” he said. “Of course it’s going to be good.”

He caught Pammie looking at him out of the corner of her eye—the reality was that the Elm City Shakespeare company had a reputation for productions that were well intentioned but not great, so there was actually quite a decent chance that it wouldn’t be good at all, and they both knew it. He hoped he wasn’t about to ruin Shakespeare for Stern in one fell swoop.

“Sometimes it seems as if the object of rich-people food is to pretend you’re not eating at all,” she said, lifting a piece of bread away from one of the mackerel pate sandwiches that Pammie had made and sniffing delicately before lifting it to her mouth. She seemed utterly unconcerned that Shakespeare or anything else might be ruined for her, and wiling to sit there as long as there was more of Pammie’s food to consume. “And yet the not-there portions somehow don’t get in the way of the enjoyment. This is delicious, Dawes.”

“Thank you,” said Pammie, offering a bright smile—small, but bright, not ducked into the folds of a giant sweatshirt. 

On his darker days Darlington was envious of what the two of them had forged while he’d been absent, but then he remembered that his whole life—his impossible return—hinged on their link, and he remembered to see it for the warm and transformative thing that it was.

The sun went down faster than Darlington would have thought, and he used the cover of almost-darkness to slip the mother-of-pearl opera glasses he’d taken from Il Bastone out of his pocket and onto the blanket. He set them down at the northwest corner of the blanket, lenses up, and tapped them twice to activate them.

“How now, spirit! Whither wander you?”

Alex gasped. Darlington had hoped they would skip the Athens scenes and start with Puck and the fairies; as the actors ran across the grass, Galileo’s Binoculars turned costumes into reality: small silver beading meant to mimic starlight actually became starlight, and the two actors hardly seemed to touch the ground as they skipped across the park.

“Look up,” said Pammie.

The company had strung the trees with subtle twinkling lights; in the illusion of the binoculars the lights became fireflies, dancing between the leaves in almost hypnotic swoops.

“Manuscript?” whispered Alex, tilting her head to indicate the glasses. Her mouth was pinched with distaste, but her eyes were alight with wonder as she watched Titania float toward them on a beam of moonlight, small flowers curling open at her feet as she took each step.

“Yep,” said Darlington.

Alex shook her head. “I wish I could write those assholes off entirely,” she whispered, soft breath tickling Darlington’s cheek. “But you can’t deny that their magic is on point.”

“An inconvenient truth,” said Pammie, shaking her head. “But a truth nonetheless.”

The play flew by—sometimes literally—as they sat together, and Darlington watched with satisfaction as Pammie and Alex settled into the blanket, shoulders relaxing as the Binoculars turned each scene into a new vision of soft magic.

Darlington had been on the wrong end of darkness, and sometimes it was hard to remember that the two of them understood, in some small way: that the three of them had been bound across time and space and the chasm of hell, as the two of them labored in lonely desperation, not even knowing, at first, that they could actually get him back. Sometimes he forgot, but as he took his next breath his body reminded him: as his chest expanded and his lungs filled and he almost felt as if he could hear the blood rushing under his skin, every sign of life was a reminder of what they had done for him.

He reached his hand across the blanket, and slowly—almost imperceptibly, as if it were one more trick of the binoculars—Alex inched her fingers toward his, running her fingertips over his before intertwining their hands.

Darlington squeezed her fingers, and allowed himself to smile.


End file.
